How the Fifties Became the Sixties

Historically Speaking January/February 2008 The Sixties Reconsidered: A Forum AMERICANS OFTEN DIVIDE 20TH-CENTURY U.S. HISTORY into decades. TheJa^Age, the Great Depression, and the Turbulent Sixties are boundedneatly into ten-yearspans. Historians of recentAmerica have reactedto that decadalview. Thepast, they contend, neverconforms so nicely to such neatcategories. In the 1950s wasfor later developments in the 1960s. Yet he emphasises that the continuity thesis has serious limitations. The 1960s witnessed a series of societal and cultural transformations that were unique to the decade. Terry H. Anderson, Alice Echols, PaulLyons, andDavidFärber respond, and Whitfieldconcludes with his reihe leadpiece to thisforum on the 1960sStephen]. Whitfieldconsiders how important joinder. How the Fifties Became the Sixties StephenJ. Whitfield In the United States, the first decade and a half or so after the Second World War seemed to lock into place a certain set of conventions—from the broad acceptance of the New Deal to the older ideal of domesticity, from the virtue of the American way of life to its extension to grateful foreigners, from very moderate progress in race relations to moderate reverence for reverence itself. But with extremely few observers quite imagining—much less predicting—what was about to happen, suddenly the Sixties would blindside what nearly all Americans had taken for granted a decade earlier. At first no reversal in the entire span of American history had seemed more dramatic, no transvaluation of values more obvious. With the possible exception of the shift from the Twenties to the Thirties, no contrast seemed to be more striking. But the economic disaster that had become so exigent by the very end of 1929 makes it easier to explain the transformation from the rambunctious self-indulgence typified by Warren G. Harding's pleasure in going out into the country to "bloviate" to the angst and collectivist fervor of the Great Depression. No such catastrophe can be summoned to explain how the Fifties became the Sixties. When that decade began, the old order hardly seemed to be undergoing a crisis. On the contrary, the standard critique was dismay that so few felt the urgency of national reexamination or amelioration. The usual objection to that decade was to dismiss it as an homage to catatonia. Robert Lowell referred to "the tranquillized Fifties" which had begun with the 1953 inauguration of a president who had instigated an age marked by "ice, ice" everywhere. "The Republic summons Ike,/the mausoleum in her heart." Garry Wills spent most of Eisenhower's two terms in a Jesuit seminary. After emerging from the novitiate to engage in classical and historical scholarship as well as in political journalism , Wills "tended to believe people who assured me I had not missed a thing."1 So how could the SixDwight and Mamie Eisenhower watching television at the Republican National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, July 1952. Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-U999A -RC109]. ties have erupted? My remarks are intended to suggest how the two decades have been linked and might be better framed. As early as 1960, a paperback anthology of primary sources aimed at undergraduate course adoption was published under the title: The 1950s: America's "Pkad" Decade. To insert a question mark at the end of that Houghton Mifflin subtitle has been the thrust of subsequent scholarship. As early as 1977, before the whiff of tear gas on the nation's campuses had been fully exhaled, the literary historian Morris Dickstein had portrayed the late Fifties as "a fertile period, a seedbed of ideas that would burgeon and live in the more activist, less reflective climate that followed. A comparable breakup and transition could be traced in almost every sphere of American society during the same period: [even] in politics . . . ." To highlight the unobstructed path into the Sixties, the case of Allen Ginsberg is especially convenient. As early as May 1946, die Columbia undergraduate was insisting that modernity required "Orphic creativeness, juvenescent savagery , primitive abandon." These were the very attributes that the counterculture would exalt two decades later, the Dionysian qualities that not even the best minds of his generation of social scientists could foresee. If "Howl" (1955), and to a lesser extent "America" (1956...